Protect Working Musicians Act of 2026

Safe harbor for independent music creators

If enacted, the bill would create a limited antitrust safe harbor for qualifying independent music creators to negotiate or jointly refuse to license their sound recordings. You would qualify as an Individual Music Creator Owner if you own copyrights to one or more sound recordings and earned under $1,000,000 in licensing revenue last year or qualify as a NAICS 512250 small business. The safe harbor would apply only for talks with a Dominant Online Music Distribution Platform (a public listening service with over $100 million in annual music-distribution revenue and not eligible for a section 114(d)(2) license) or with developers/deployers of generative AI. Negotiations must not be limited to price, must be nondiscriminatory to similarly situated creators, be directly related and reasonably necessary for the talks, and must not include anyone other than IMCOs and the platform or AI developer. The bill would define generative AI as systems that generate new text, images, video, or audio from prompts, would define "antitrust laws" for this Act to include the Clayton Act, FTC Act section 5, and relevant state laws, and would say the Act does not otherwise change antitrust law.